Quality Education – Invest Now or Pay Later
Strong, well-funded public schools and affordable
universities are essential for Texas families to improve their standard of living and for
the long-term health of the Texas economy. Quality public schools are the state’s
best investment in its future, and a well-educated workforce is the best way to attract
good jobs to our state.
But good education doesn’t just happen. It
requires an investment by the taxpayers, not diversion of taxpayer dollars from public
education to favor those who already have the advantages, while guaranteeing a large
underclass that is qualified only for minimum wage jobs and permanently dependent on food
stamps, Medicaid and other taxpayer funded programs.
There are no easy solutions to the school funding
dilemma, but the Texas legislature needs to begin its school funding debate with the
bottom line – how much it will cost to provide a good public education – and
work from there to find a reasonable formula for school funding.
In order to succeed in school, students need
- well-qualified teachers who understand both their subject fields and
the best ways of teaching
- up-to-date textbooks and equipment
- small classes so teachers can address individual needs
- more tutors to ensure that those who have fallen behind will not drop
out (Texas, unfortunately, now leads the nation in dropout rates)
College students need
- affordable tuition
- access to public universities with internationally recognized
faculties
Teachers need
- pay based on service and continuing education, not on student test
scores
- affordable health insurance
- manageable class sizes
- more time to teach their subjects instead of preparing students for
state tests that will make or break the teacher’s career
The future of the Texas economy rests on public schools
that teach every student, regardless of family income and achievement to date. A quality
public education system will produce self-sufficient, adaptable adult workers who can
attract the best employers to the state.
Paid by Nancy Stevens Campaign, P.O. Box
100893, Fort Worth, TX 76185, 817-926-3109
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Insurance Reform
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Affordable Homeowners and Auto Insurance
– It’s Time for Real Reform
Compare your 2004 insurance bills to what you were paying in 2000.
Warning: You’d better sit down while you do it.
Texas homeowners pay the highest insurance rates in the nation.
Those rates have climbed dramatically since 2000, sometimes doubling while coverage
declined. Homeowners must have insurance if they have a mortgage, and drivers must have
liability insurance, but they have no control over rapidly rising insurance premiums
because many companies are not writing new policies.
The 2003 Texas legislature claimed to enact "insurance
reform," but their laws actually weakened already lax controls on insurance.
Insurance companies continue to charge whatever they want, usually far above benchmark
insurance rates established by the insurance commissioner.
It is time for real insurance reform that rolls back homeowners and
auto insurance rates to benchmark – and thus more affordable – prices.
Credit scoring – the practice of charging higher auto and
homeowners insurance rates to those with blemishes on their credit report – also
needs to be stopped. Many families have had to struggle through layoffs and reduced
incomes during the economic downturn of 2001-2004, and credit scoring is an unfair
practice that penalizes them for forces beyond their control.
Paid by Nancy Stevens Campaign, P.O. Box
100893, Fort Worth, TX 76185, 817-926-3109
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Clean air and clean water
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Clean Air and Water – A Right for
Every Texan
Every year the number and severity of Fort Worth’s alert days
goes up. In August 2003, we had our first-ever purple ozone alert, meaning that the air
was bad for anyone to breathe.
Breathable air is a right of every Texan. Instead, North Texans face
a crisis in air quality. The Metroplex will lose federal highway funds if air pollution is
not improved by 2007. Instead of working for better air, the incumbent for district 97 has
missed key votes on air quality attainment and has accepted PAC money from some of the
biggest polluters in North Texas.
While lower speed limits and more stringent vehicle emissions test
are important steps in the right direction, the legislature needs to find additional
resources to clean up dirty cars, encourage more low-emission public transportation
projects, and enforce sanctions on large-scale polluters to reduce our chronic ozone
problems.
Keeping our water clean and protecting the public’s rights to
sometimes scarce water resources are other important areas for legislative action.
Agricultural and urban runoff problems that foul drinking water supplies need oversight.
Aquifers are public resources for everyone’s use, and no individual or corporation
should be able to claim an area’s water resources to sell to the highest bidder.
Paid by Nancy Stevens Campaign, P.O. Box
100893, Fort Worth, TX 76185, 817-926-3109
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Affordable health insurance
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Affordable Health Insurance
– An Investment We Must Make
Over the last two years, more than 8 million Texans
– including millions of self-employed and full-time workers – lacked health
insurance of any kind. Texas now leads the nation in the number of citizens without health
insurance.
Most people who have health insurance get it through
work, but by 1998, only 27% of American employers offered health insurance. The higher
unemployment rates of 2001-2004, coupled with rapidly escalating insurance rates, meant
that many Texans lost their health insurance.
In the midst of this crisis, the Republican-dominated
Texas legislature removed 120,000 children of the working poor from the Children’s
Health Insurance Program (CHIP) – a move that cost the state millions of dollars in
federal matching funds for the CHIP program.
Being uninsured doesn’t keep people from becoming
ill. Instead, those without health insurance delay medical care, and that raises both
taxes and the cost of medical care for everyone. Public hospitals and clinics must treat
more uninsured patients, and local property taxes rise to pay for it. Treatable illnesses
become serious or even life-threatening, uninsured people have to go to emergency rooms
– the most expensive places to obtain health care. Hospitals and doctors then have to
pass along their costs for treating the uninsured to insured patients through higher
medical costs, further raising health insurance premiums and reducing the number of people
with insurance. Through increased taxes and increased premiums, we all pay twice for the
state’s health insurance crisis.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The state insurance commissioner could help alleviate
this problem by using insurance markets to create large groups of citizens for health
insurance companies to bid on. That should allow most Texans to purchase basic health care
coverage at an affordable cost. Better care in the early stages of illness would
eventually lower medical costs to insurance companies and taxpayers alike while adding to
Texans’ quality of life.
Paid by Nancy Stevens Campaign, P.O. Box
100893, Fort Worth, TX 76185, 817-926-3109
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Fiscal responsibility and fair taxation
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Fiscal Responsibility – Using Every
Tax Dollar Wisely
Since 2000, the state of Texas has gone from a $2 billion budget
surplus to a $9.9 billion budget shortfall. The 2003 legislature tried to dodge the
problem by cutting services that Texans depended on, raising fees across the board, and
pushing responsibility (and costs) for essential services to the local level.
The results? Poorer service from state agencies, larger class sizes
in many schools, and higher local taxes. To make matters worse, the state’s fiscal
shortsightedness sacrificed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal matching funds. The
U.S. Department of Education, for example, had $102 million in funds for disadvantaged
students that the state had not claimed, and the state lost additional millions of federal
matching dollars for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding when the
state removed 120,000 poor children from the program.
Though many important programs are underfunded, the state continues
to waste money on non-essential programs that take taxpayer money to reward its friends
and to exercise political vendettas. These include:
- the governor’s $300 million discretionary fund for entertaining
and offering further tax favors to businesses that might relocate to Texas
- continuous audits of the comptroller’s office when the original
audit showed no problems (Republican Comptroller Carol Keaton Strayhorn calls them
political harassment)
- three special sessions that cost taxpayers millions of dollars to
give Tom DeLay more power in Washington and deny millions of Texans their chance to
influence congressional elections
- a worthless special session on school finance that was mere political
grandstanding rather than a real attempt to solve critical problems
- the governor’s contract with a Nevada consulting firm to look at
imposing gambling in Texas
The 2005 legislature needs to find better, fairer ways to distribute
the tax burden so that no one group bears too much of it. Property taxes and sales taxes
are already high, so the legislature will need to tackle other sources of revenue, such as
stronger enforcement of the franchise tax on corporations that are based in Texas but
incorporated in Delaware or Nevada.
Paid by Nancy Stevens Campaign, P.O. Box
100893, Fort Worth, TX 76185, 817-926-3109
